Is Modest Mouse Standing Still, Or Are We?

originally published May 2, 2007

The cover image of Modest Mouse’s new album We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank is a hot-air balloon holding aloft an anchor instead of a basket - one thing pulling up, the other pulling down. It’s an image of cautious optimism, or hopeful pessimism, and, in a lot of ways, it’s the perfect illustration for the band's breakout single “Float On,” from 2004’s Good News for People Who Love Bad News. “Alright, don’t worry even if things end up a bit too heavy. We’ll all float on. Alright already, we’ll all float on.” The way singer-guitarist-chief songwriter Isaac Brock sings those lines, breaking up the “alright / already,” coupled with the disco stomp of the music, turns the song into a celebration of hope and endurance, of the small victories amid everyday defeats. But when you read it the way it’s written in the liner notes - “alright already, we’ll all float on” - it takes on a more sinister edge. You’ll keep floating no matter what, even if you don’t want to. The balloon and the anchor create an equilibrium: you won’t get any lower, but you won’t get any higher, either.

The ghost of “Float On” haunts We Were Dead even beyond the cover. The first single, “Dashboard,” borrows the earlier song’s danceable beat and squawking guitars and even its imagery of finding hope in a car wreck: “The dashboard melted but we still had the radio... Every dawn one yells ‘Surprise,’ and in the evening one’s consoling, sayin’ ‘See it wasn’t quite as bad as it could’ve been.’

” The band piles on everything it can think of - horns, strings, programmed beats, even a club-ready filtered bridge (shades of Nelly Furtado’s “Maneater”) - but in the end, it doesn’t amount to much, just a bunch of sounds in search of a better song.

Somewhat more successful is “Fire It Up,” built on a fat bouncing ball of bass and skittering electronic cymbals, but the digital trickery only gives off a straight-outta-1997 vibe. Lyrical echoes of “Float On” crop up all over the place: “Cheer up baby, it wasn’t really always quite so bad / For every bit of venom that came out the antidote was had,” in “Spitting Venom;” “We’ll get crushed by the ocean, but it will not get us wet,” the last line of the album, in “Invisible.” The phrase “stubborn beauty” appears in both “Parting of the Sensory” and “Education.” (Brock has frequently reused lyrical snippets like this, which has only added to the band’s mystique - almost like he’s quoting some larger work that only he knows about.)

What all these lines and phrases add up to is a balloon-and-anchor world-view, like the bitterly ironic jokes that make up most of Modest Mouse’s album titles: We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, Good News for People Who Love Bad News, Lonesome Crowded West, This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About. You can see the glass as half-full or half-empty, but no matter how you look at it, the water level remains the same. There’s another way to put this, as Brock himself does on the cracked Victorian robot fable “Steam Engenius:" “Stasis is what you’ve got. Like a rickshaw getting pulled around by another rickshaw.” And that feeling of stasis has crept into Modest Mouse’s music as well.

Getting it Right

We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank is neither a bad nor an uninteresting album. It starts off strong with “March Into the Sea,” a demented chantey that alternates between clanging, roiling verses and lovely, chiming choruses, with Brock hollering invective like only he can over a sawing violin. “Little Motel” is one of the loveliest songs Brock’s ever written, and illustrates just how much he’s grown as a songwriter in the last 10 years - aside from Brock’s inimitable voice, it simply does not sound like the same band that made This Is a Long Drive, and I mean that in mostly a good way. Album closers “People As Places As People” and “Invisible” are also both great songs that take the things that have always defined Modest Mouse - the knotty, squealing riffs, the bumpy rhythm section, Brock’s barking vocals (literally barking, on “People As Places As People”) - and compress them into more easily manageable shapes.

“Spitting Venom” is an old-school eight-minute Modest Mouse epic, but it bears little resemblance to, say, Lonesome Crowded West’s “Truckers Atlas.” Instead of working a fractured groove ad infinitum, “Spitting Venom” builds itself out of discrete movements that nevertheless gel into a satisfying whole. “Tight” is the word of the day here. Modest Mouse have never been sloppy, exactly, but even on Good News there were times when it seemed like the bandmembers were about to jump the rails. Not so here. Everything’s always under control.

Frankly, I’ll be shocked if “Missed the Boat” and “We’ve Got Everything” - which, unlike “Dashboard,” gets the “Float On” pop formula right - don’t become mainstream hits. James Mercer of The Shins provides backing vocals on both songs, and does a fine job as the Mike Mills to Brock’s Michael Stipe. They have similar wavery, high-pitched singing voices, but Mercer’s is clear where Brock’s is rough, providing an interesting (not to mention radio-friendly) counterpoint. As long as Brock is handing out invitations to join the band, he might want to extend one to Mercer.

Oh yeah, that’s right. In case you haven’t heard, Mercer isn’t the only Indie Rock Royalty to appear on We Were Dead. Guitarist Johnny Marr, the genius in The Smiths not named Morrissey, has joined up with Modest Mouse after apparently being invited pretty much out of the blue by Brock to write some songs together. Those songwriting sessions turned into a full-time gig with the band. It’s hard to tell exactly what effect Marr’s presence has had on Modest Mouse - as noted earlier, the playing and songwriting are tighter, but this is a band that’s been playing together for over a decade and has made great strides in that direction on each album, so whatever Marr’s influence might be, it’s not readily apparent; he’s certainly not bringing out Brock’s inner Morrissey.

As for his guitar playing, all I can say is that he’s proven himself to be a great session player. A few of the songs have different guitar lines on the right and left channels, but I couldn’t tell you which one belongs to Brock and which to Marr. Similarly, while I might guess that Marr is responsible for the gorgeous solos in “Little Motel” or “People As Places As People,” they sound enough like Brock to keep doubt alive. Marr is a facilitator on this album, helping make the most of Brock’s musical voice instead of imposing his own.

Still Just Floating

So, then, if there is so much to like about We Were Dead, why do I feel this sense of stasis? I think the answer lies in the fact that when I thought about how I would review the album, I mentally composed an opening paragraph like this: “Modest Mouse’s albums have all, to some degree, illustrated the idea that it’s still possible to feel closed in by America’s wide-open spaces, and the expansiveness of the geography has informed the band’s music: guitar lines slowly uncoil and meander without ever losing a sense of unease, the feeling that we should make the journey last as long as possible because bad things are waiting when we reach our destination. On We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, Modest Mouse leader Isaac Brock trades some of that expansiveness for a greater command of songcraft, and the result is a collection of great songs that doesn’t quite hold together as an album the way The Moon and Antarctica or This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About does.” Turns out that that paragraph, with one album-title substitution, is the first paragraph of my review of Good News for People Who Love Bad News, from the Apr. 21, 2004, Flagpole.

So maybe this just means that I’m a lazy writer. But I think it’s more likely that it means that, despite the addition of Marr to the lineup, there’s not much new on We Were Dead - it’s Good News Part 2. Now that’s not necessarily a bad thing, particularly when a band has reached the level Modest Mouse has. Following up an album like Good News with one that’s nearly as good would be impressive for any band. And for the numerous listeners whose first Modest Mouse album was Good News, this is surely a pretty great “sophomore” disc (it debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts with 129,000 records sold, so there’s that). But the lack of something truly new on the album gets at the heart of what we want when we listen to music.

We have two conflicting desires when we listen to new music (or when we do anything, for that matter, but let’s stay focused on music): one is to hear something familiar, something that reminds us of something we already like. The other is to hear something new, something startling, something we’ve never heard before. We like Modest Mouse because it sounds like Modest Mouse - that is, the ur-Modest Mouse of the band's first album This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About, the sound so clearly influenced by the important forebears (Pixies, Talking Heads, Pavement, Dinosaur Jr., Built to Spill), but rangier, tougher, unschooled, more “blue collar” as Matthew Perpetua of Fluxblog put it. Plus of course the deranged dude yelping over the top of the music. But we don’t just want to hear that sound anymore. We want to hear that sound, plus something new. The second album introduced more focused songwriting, a broader sonic palette. The band got a major-label budget with the third album and used it to create a masterpiece. On the fourth album, the group dove even deeper into the toybox and came up with a genuine goddamn pop smash. But the fifth album - well, it’s a lot like the fourth, only without that genius single.

We want to hear something that’s both familiar and new, and when an album or song falls too much to either side, we get bored. I recognize that this is extremely unfair to a band like Modest Mouse, which has played and toured and recorded incessantly for over a decade, which has progressed from scrappy indie band to platinum-selling semi-star act with artistic integrity intact, but I can’t help it. I can’t help comparing We Were Dead to another album that came out on the same day, LCD Soundsystem’s second album Sound of Silver, which is absolutely incredible and excites me as much as The Moon and Antarctica did in 2000. I’ve been spoiled for choice, and I want something new.

This is almost the opposite problem of one noted by Do You Feel Loved? blogger Chris Conroy in a Mar. 6 post (http://dyfl.vox.com/library/post/biblical.html) about negative reactions towards Arcade Fire’s second album, Neon Bible.

“In the Internet age, it works like this," he wrote. "A band puts out an album, the myth gets written, people enjoy the record. But when a second record comes around a few years later, everybody feels the need to re-assert the fact that indeed, they listened to that first album, and time has elapsed since that record was released, meaning they have Lived With Those Songs and that They Know What Makes This Band Great… In these hyper-accelerated times, it only takes one album to get everybody started on their deeply rigid conceptions of what an artist is supposed to be or do.”

Tug of War

I think Conroy is right on the money, but the corollary to that argument is that when the work of thousands, if not millions, of artists is only a couple of mouse clicks away, maybe one album - one song, even - is all we need from any one artist. A band gets one chance to make an impression, and that impression defines the band. If we want something different, we’ll listen to a different band.

Someone named “Velociraptors” said this in the comments thread to Conroy’s post: “I go to the Arcade Fire when I'm in the mood for a certain kind of music, and I'm not sure what mood longs for Neon Bible yet.” But why waste two perfectly good moods on the same band? At this point there’s a band out there for every mood you could ever think of having - a band for every second of your day, without ever having to hear one twice.

Now, I know that’s not true; as noted above, Sound of Silver proves that, not to mention that all of Modest Mouse’s albums do, too. But this is the climate in which Modest Mouse, a band that did come up the old-fashioned, album-by-album way, now finds itself. Good News and “Float On” hit right at the beginning of the mp3-blog explosion, which didn’t create the scenario Conroy describes, but certainly accelerated it. Now even longtime listeners can find their interest stretched in two different directions. On the one hand, I want Modest Mouse to sound exactly like it did 10 years ago on Lonesome Crowded West. On the other hand, I want Brock to invite Timbaland to join the band - if they’re going to mess with drum machines, stop screwing around and bring in the best!

How is a band supposed to thrive when there’s this tug-of-war going on in the minds of listeners? There’s an anchor pulling us toward the safe and comfortable, a balloon pulling us toward the thrilling and new. And in the middle is Modest Mouse, as idiosyncratic and cantankerous as ever, in a state that we listeners confuse for stasis.

Gardner Linn

Liner Notes is Flagpole's music opinion column. Interested in contributing? Contact music editor Chris Hassiotis with ideas at music@flagpole.com.

Get Ur Freakout On With The Ohsees

originally published May 2, 2007

One time a good while ago, John Animal Dwyer, frontman for San Francisco's The Ohsees, and I were kicking around New York right after his then-band, Coachwhips, had destroyed a sardine-packed crowd at this bi-level East Village shithole called Lit. And surely enough, lit was what we got as we sailed through the city night - in the band's tour van, to some unidentifiable Chinatown loft, to some grimy top-lit Brooklyn apartment where we set up shop for a blurry six hours, and that I later found out belonged to the guys from TV on the Radio, who weren’t around that evening because they were, oddly enough, playing in my hometown of Greensboro, NC, and on one of our stops, we were unloading some of gear into someone’s flat and I found a banjo leaned against a pillar and I picked it up and started plucking out this shitty raga on it.

JD heard me as he lugged in a cymbal bag and ran straight over and tore the instrument from my hands and through gritted teeth said, “You want some banjo, Jimmy?!?!?!” and proceeded to absolutely shred on the thing. He Scruggs-rolled "The Wabash Cannonball" or some such thing with serious velocity and conviction, banging his narrow-ass head around as he chorded up and down the neck in what was supposed to be some deranged fast-track banjo primer to me - the boy from the Carolina hills, not 10 miles from where early banjo genius Charlie Poole comes from - and then he chuckled and handed it back to me and said, “Get on with it,” and moved to grab another amp.Sucks Blood, the new record from his relatively new band The Ohsees and a follow-up to last year's The Cool Death of Island Raiders, springs fully-formed from this hyperactive countrified impulse. Not that The Ohsees’ tuneage is "country music" by any stretch, but it is folkish and chiming and rife with acoustic guitars and singing-saws and tremulous undulating seventh chords, and yet it retains the experimental nature Dwyer's music’s always had: he was one half of Providence noise-terror band Pink and Brown, and Coachwhips’ apoplectic garage ‘splosion always held a whole metric ton of heavy art-damage.

Flat-out, Sucks Blood is one of the coolest new records I’ve heard in a long long time, and I was a bit surprised by it; I mean, Coachwhips was great, and I dig that band's records every good blue moon, but in the studio, those guys pretty much just rolled tape and ripped. The whole trip suffered a little bit minus the rabid spazz-out, all the beer flying around your head, and the tattooed maniac running around with a stolen telephone receiver taped to his face while he sings through it. With this new one, John and his crew have produced a killer headphones record; Sucks Blood has great laid-back songs brimming with beautiful melodic guitar playing. The characteristic garage rawness is there, as well, and they’ve even thrown in some freako studio trickery: two krautrockish instrumentals, one peaceful and drifting, the other irritating as shit.

The Ohsees' male-female vocal interplay between Brigid Dawson and John is rad, too, and starkly original and really creepy sometimes; it manages somehow to sound alternately upliftingly lightweight and ominously androgynous, like some hooded apocalyptic valkyrie has come with milk and cookies to warn you (nicely!) of the arriving cataclysm. Also, maybe imagine taking a whole bunch of Valium to quiet your still-lingering LSD halo, and drifting off to Never Never while listening to a Lee Hazelwood-Nancy Sinatra duet, and you get a good gist.

As for more cheesy quick-reference musical APB’s - as that’s what puts asses in seats - here goes: The Ohsees sound sometimes like Syd Barrett fronting a Pebbles-ish '60s punk band, and sometimes they sound like the first version of The Fall covering Jacques Brel, and sometimes they sound like they’ve bored a tiny gloryhole into your skull and are poking weird sticks in there just for fun. Trust this: Sucks Blood is a stone killer, and you’d be a real dick to miss The Ohsees' Caledonia show on Monday, May 7, as I feel Athens is way ripe for a little education on how to weird-out a whole roomful of people into rethinking their musical selves. My best guess is that The Ohsees are gonna be the ones to do it, and they are gonna bring the pain something fierce.

Jim McHugh

Liner Notes is Flagpole's music opinion column. Interested in contributing? Contact music editor Chris Hassiotis with ideas at music@flagpole.com.